19TH CENTURY, POSSIBLY INCORPORATING MEDIEVAL ELEMENTS

The orientalist taste of the second half of the 19th century was a godsend for the architectural salvage merchants who must have been around at the time. Trips to Cairo, Damascus and the other cities in the near east would have yielded quantities of old damaged Islamic furnishings, while the wealthy residents in these cities were vying for the most up-to-date French fashions. At the most expensive end there were collectors like Charles Gillot (1853-1903) who bought a spectacular inlaid panel from minbar of the Amir Qawsun dating from around 1330, and then had the leading Parisian ebénisté use walnut wood to make it into a doorway for his house in the 9th district (Ancienne Collection Charles Gillot, Christie’s, Paris, 4-5 March 2008, lot 41). Many aspired to the taste, but were less fastidious about the actual date of the original interlace. Today it can be hard, without recourse to the expense of a scientific test, to say for certain how much, if any, of such panels are actually medieval and how much was adapted or even created for the 19th century fashionable interior market.